In general, an appliance/electronic product is provided with 110 V or 220 V of AC commercial power to an internal power unit by connecting a power plug of the product to a socket installed in a home or office, and using the power by converting the commercial power to a normal DC operating power by a power unit. The appliance/electronic product consumes minimum necessary power, that is, standby power, for operating an on/off switch that generates a signal for detecting a powering on/off operation by a user and for driving the power switching unit for supplying power to the power unit even in the general powered off state.
The surest way to cut off the standby power is to pull out a power plug from a socket, but it is very cumbersome to perform the operation every time the user do not use the product and the standby power is continuously consumed since the power plug is generally kept connected.
Accordingly, in order to reduce the standby power, various standby power reducing sockets and standby power reducing devices have been studied and provided. Especially, in order to reduce the standby power, countries of the world restricts standby power of all the electronic products to 1 W or less and introduce programs for gradually reinforcing the regulations.
However, since the restrictions do not regulate the power factor, the overall power production amount of the countries is not greatly different before and after the restriction, the waste of the energy is the same as before the restriction, and the CO2 generation amount caused by the power production remains the same. Therefore, the environment is kept contaminated. In addition, since an additional complicated configuration for satisfying the restriction in which the standby power is maintained to be 1 W or less is incorporated, there has been a problem of increasing the product price.